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Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?
The lesson to the apprentice – and to humanity – is clear: never summon powers you cannot control.
The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion.
What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.
Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.
While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That’s how we got, for example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength.
The naive view argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of medicine, physics, economics and numerous other fields, which makes the network not only powerful but also wise.
AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision-making. AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent.
History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes and how things change.
To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask ‘How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?’ often the more crucial questions are ‘How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?’
Many societies require their populations not to know their true origins: ignorance is strength.
Islam is an example of such ignorance.
This poem is mandatory reading in many Israeli schools today. It is also mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand how after two millennia of being one of the most pacifist groups in history, Jews built one of the most formidable armies in the world. Not for nothing was Bialik named Israel’s national poet.
Grizzly bears and polar bears sometimes produce pizzly bears and grolar bears.26 Lions and tigers produce ligers and tigons.27 When we shift our attention from mammals and other multicellular organisms to the world of single-cell bacteria and archaea, we discover that anarchy reigns. In a process known as horizontal gene transfer, single-cell organisms routinely exchange genetic material not only with organisms from related species but also with organisms from entirely different genera, kingdoms, orders and even domains. Bacteriologists have a very difficult job keeping tabs on these chimeras.
Siblings routinely compete for food and parental attention, and in some species the killing of one sibling by another is commonplace. About a quarter of spotted hyena cubs are killed by their siblings, who typically enjoy greater parental care as a result.36 Among sand tiger sharks, females hold numerous embryos in their uterus. The first embryo that reaches about ten centimetres in length then eats all the others.
According to one important Hadith, Muhammad said that ‘Allah will ensure my community will never agree on error.’
Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.
Democratic Party of US or lefties.
In present-day North Korea no democratic conversation takes place because people aren’t free to talk, yet we could well imagine a situation when this freedom is guaranteed – as it is in South Korea. In the present-day United States the democratic conversation is endangered by people’s inability to listen to and respect their political rivals, yet this can presumably still be fixed. By contrast, in the Roman Empire there was simply no way to conduct or sustain a democratic conversation, because the technological means to hold such a conversation did not exist.
The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. ‘Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,’ he said. ‘But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.’
CAPTCHA is an acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, and it typically consists of a string of twisted letters or other visual symbols that humans can identify correctly but computers struggle with.
